What’s coming in Moodle 3.5 – the next LTS version of Moodle

Moodle 3.5 is the next upcoming major version of the Moodle LMS. It is scheduled to be released in the second week of May 2018. Like each major version release, every new Moodle version is packed with many new features and improvements. So, Moodle 3.5 will also unleash many new cutting edge features and improvements.

Moodle 3.5 will be a Long Term Supported (LTS version) of Moodle which means that it will be having a security support for 36 months from the date of release along with a general bug fixing support of 12 months.

Major Features coming in Moodle 3.5:

Here are some of the Major features and improvements coming in Moodle 3.5:

GDPR Support – The first priority for all the institutions in EU region is to make their Moodle site GDPR compliant. Moodle HQ team is working hard to support GDPR compliance for all Moodle sites. Initially, they will introduce Moodle plugins for Moodle site running Moodle 3.3 & Moodle 3.4 versions. With the release of Moodle 3.5, these plugins will be incorporated in Moodle core. Check out the progress updates here.

Question Bank Improvements – The project contributed by Moodle User’s Association for Jan-June 2017 project development cycle. Question bank improvement project will improve the overall Question bank management. The project will allow the teachers to add new labels to questions for creating question sets out of different categories. It will also help the use of questions in ‘random question set’ question types instead of ‘random question from category’.

Update to Moodle Mobile app – The official Moodle mobile app will be upgraded to a new version to Ionic 3 framework, some usability improvements and introducing features for GDPR compliance.

Messaging API improvements – Moodle HQ development team is also working on future expansion of the messaging functionality in Moodle. This involves some changes to the message database tables and message events. It also includes the new LTI Advantage extensions. LTI Advantage is a package of extensions that build on the core LTI standard (v1.1 or higher) to add new features that enable deeper integration of any tool with any LMS. Check out more about the LTI Advantage here.

Deprecation of the legacy cron – Since Moodle has both a CRON system and Scheduled Task API, so Moodle HQ development team is also working on formally deprecating the legacy cron system and encouraging developers to migrate their jobs to the Task API. Check out the discussion here.

With all these new features and improvements, Moodle 3.5 is surely going to offer a brand new experience. Let’s wait for its release in May 2018.